Improvement of detection performance on single photon lidar by EMD-based denoising method

Abstract A novel EMD-based denoising method, referred to as EMD with soft thresholding and Savitzky-Golay, is proposed for single photon lidar denoising. After the discrimination of the high-frequency and low-frequency IMFs, the soft thresholding and Savitzky-Golay filter are applied, respectively. The proposed denoising method has a better denoising performance and less signal distortion on simulated single photon lidar data than that of EMD partial reconstruction and wavelet transform method. With the proposed method, the SNR of real single photon lidar increased from 12.36 to 15.32 dB and false alarm rate is reduced obviously.